Photo by Deb Gau Marshall City Administrator Sharon Hanson and Mayor Bob Byrnes deliver the annual State of the City Address on Wednesday.

MARSHALL — The city of Marshall saw some key developments over the past year. But there’s also a lot of work ahead in a variety of areas, Mayor Bob Byrnes and City Administrator Sharon Hanson said.

During Wednesday’s State of the City Address, Byrnes and Hanson talked about topics including workforce concerns, the future of the Marshall Aquatic Center, and the city’s dispute of its 2020 census figures.

“We did appeal that. It was a long process, and recently within the last month, we were notified by the census that they did approve our appeal,” Byrnes said. “That’s the good news. The downside is, they also told us they couldn’t share our new numbers with us because of data privacy. So we’re working with our congressional offices to change that.”

Data from the April 2020 U.S. census said Marshall’s population had decreased by 52 since 2010. However, Byrnes maintained that residents in Ward 1 of the city were undercounted, due to the COVID pandemic closing the campus of Southwest Minnesota State University. Census results showed population growth in Marshall’s other two voting wards, but a decrease in Ward 1.

“We know that number is wrong. We know that the Census Bureau agrees with that. Now the next step is, we’re going to figure out what that actual number is,” Byrnes said.

A year of development

The past year saw a lot of notable developments in Marshall, including commercial projects downtown well as along East College Drive, Byrnes and Hanson said.

“Of course, one of those is the development of the former Mercantile building that was done by the Knochenmus family,” Byrnes said.

The building at Main Street and College Drive was redeveloped into new corporate offices for Ralco, as well as the Upper Room event center and the new Atlantic Place restaurant.

Construction of the new Block 100 development (formerly called “Block 11”) near the Varsity Pub was also the culmination of a lot of planning and preparation by the city, Byrnes said.

“We spent over 25 years thinking about redevelopment here,” Byrnes said.

Now, construction is underway on a 36-unit apartment building on that block. Two more buildings with a combination of retail space and apartments are planned next.

“It’s a total development of $12 million,” Hanson said.

“We anticipate quite a bit more development on College Drive this year,” Byrnes said.

Kwik Trip bought the former Speedway gas station property to build a new convenience store. Dollar General built a store on College Drive and Family Dollar is planning to build a store further up the street, Byrnes said. Domino’s Pizza will be moving onto another former gas station property on College Drive, and the Habitat for Humanity ReStore will be moving into a new location on College Drive as well.

In the past year, a development group also bought land for a planned hotel project near the Red Baron Arena and Expo, Byrnes said.

“Many of the sports groups have been anxious for this over the years. So there is that now, the land has been acquired and we would anticipate that, as the group goes through lots of planning, that hopefully sometime this year an 83-room hotel will be under construction there,” he said.

Byrnes said 12 single-family houses were built in Marshall in the past year, in addition to construction of multi-family housing.

“We’ll probably see less homes this year, just because interest rates are higher, but there is already activity with single-family development in the community,” Byrnes said.

Future priorities

While the past year was busy, things are not slowing down in Marshall, Byrnes and Hanson said.

“We’ve got a lot of things coming on the horizon,” Hanson said.

One major ongoing project for Marshall will be replacing the city’s Aquatic Center. The municipal pool is currently more than 80 years old and leaks 12,000 gallons of water a day, Hanson said. She said a community survey found broad support for updating the center. However, moving forward with construction would require an extension of Marshall’s local option sales tax.

“We made the determination early on that if it was solely based on property taxes, that wouldn’t be possible. That would be about a 20% increase in property tax levy,” Byrnes said. “So our proposal is that the sales tax would be extended at the very same level — not an increase — to pay for the new aquatic center.”

Byrnes said the city is working with the Minnesota Legislature to get permission to take the sales tax question to the voters this fall.

“Assuming that would have the support of the voters, construction would begin in 2024,” he said.

Hanson said the city is also trying to help make further redevelopment along East College Drive possible.

“Recently we were awarded a Main Street Revitalization Grant, this is a Minnesota DEED grant. We had the Southwest Initiative Foundation do a lot of cheerleading for this particular fund, and getting this grant for us,” she said. “It’s going to be in the amount of $644,000. It will provide cost-share to those on East College Drive, that’s from Main Street going east, doing some renovation construction projects.”

Hanson said the Marshall Economic Development Authority has had some good interest from property owners so far.

“We also recognize workforce recruitment is a challenge for all of us,” Byrnes said.

He said efforts in the public and private sectors are still ongoing to help bring more workers to the Marshall area.

“Our Southwest Council of Mayors is working on a workforce development program that would basically mirror program in South Dakota,” where people learning a trade could get free tuition from a Minnesota technical college if they stay in the region for at least three years, he said.

Byrnes said they hoped the program would get support from the Legislature this year.